


Plant Paladin

by nerdiekatie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Teen for light cussing, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27905290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdiekatie/pseuds/nerdiekatie
Summary: “She’s supposed to be a paladin of the forest, but all she has is a botany lab of dead plants.” After the events on Olkarion, Pidge is given a gift. She should be able to take care of one plant. Right?
Relationships: Pidge | Katie Holt & Green Lion
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Pidge Angst Bang





	Plant Paladin

**Author's Note:**

> “You know, it’s weird. I’ve always been a tech junkie. That’s how I connected to the world. But, for the first time, I feel connected to everything. I guess it’s like Ryner said. We’re all made up of the same cosmic dust.” - Pidge, Greening the Cube
> 
> Special thanks to betas Rey and [Sakarrie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakarrie/works) and Artist [Zoedozy](https://zoedozy.tumblr.com/post/636957174589997056/there-are-plants-in-the-forest-rife-with-insects)

It starts on Olkarion when a little plant in a small pot is placed gently into Pidge’s tentative hands.

“To remind you of your time here,” Ryner says.

Pidge thanks her and carries the plant onto the castleship. She sets it on her bed and stares at it, hands on her hips. It looks like one of those little potted trees from Earth-a Bonanza, or something like that. She stares at the tiny tree made up of their shared cosmic dust and realizes she doesn’t know how to take care of it.

_Shit._

She leans in, examining it carefully and hoping to gain some hint. Instead, she sneezes. _Ugh._ Pidge wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She steps back, away from the sneeze-inducing tree, and looks around her room. Whatever this tree needs, it probably isn’t here. Her room is a mess. In her defense, it’s not like a forest is cleaner, but the little tree still needs, like, light and stuff.

She carries the tree cautiously in her arms and searches for a room to keep it.

She ends up picking a room that is open, well-lit, and most importantly, empty. Well… empty enough, Pidge thinks as she kicks items out of the way. It’s cleaner than her room, at least, so she sets the little tree down in the middle of the floor.

 _What do trees need?_ she wonders. Light. She’s got that. And water. She’d better get some.

Pidge comes back from the kitchen with a full cup a moment later and dumps it in the pot. _This isn’t so bad_ , she thinks. She can handle it.

* * *

The tree is brown within one quintant and dead within two. Pidge stares at the little pile of decaying leaves and wet dirt. _Gross._ At least it’s not making her sneeze anymore, but she thought…

It doesn’t matter.

* * *

Pidge is a Paladin of Voltron, though, and she doesn’t give up easily. With the last plant both soaking wet and dead, she decides to vary her approach.

At the next planet, she acquires four plants to make an experiment out of them. She waters one every day to test the repeatability of her last data set- the poor, dead Olkari tree- and never waters the second as a control. For the remaining plants, she picks different watering schedules for the next two weeks and records her data for all of them.

The results make her want to rattle her new, prickly, purple experiments. The one she watered every day is blooming. Fucking _blooming_. Instead of being a soaking wet mess, it has little white flowers sprouting from the top.

The one that never got watered is dry and dead. The other two aren’t dead yet; she thinks they might be salvageable, and she spends the next two weeks trying to save them.

She fails. One by one, they turn pink, then yellow, then finally brown and dead. The one with the flower is the last to go, its petals long since fallen to the floor. She shoves the failed experiments to the corner with the remnants of the tree. Her eyes water, and she tells herself it’s just allergies, not tears. There’s no reason to cry when all she needs is more data.

* * *

Shiro pulls her over after training one day.

"I'm concerned about you," he says bluntly, in a tone she knows he wouldn't use with Hunk. Shiro knows her too well to beat around the bush and allow her to brush him off.

"Oh?" Pidge asks, playing it cool. She hopes he doesn't know about the botany lab. Logically, she knows he'd be happy for her to have a hobby, maybe even interested, but she still can't stop the feeling that she has to keep this between herself and her plants.

"We never see you anymore," he says. "You're always gone right after training—"

"That's not true!" Pidge retorts. "Just last week I decrypted—"

Shiro holds up his hands. "I know," he says. "I'm not talking about the team or the war. I'm talking about your downtime. I don't see you in the common rooms, not even for meals."

She crosses her arms defensively, wanting very much to be done with this conversation. "I just want some time alone, okay?" she snaps.

"That's fine," Shiro says patiently. "We're all entitled to some alone time." His eyes search her face, and she braces herself for what she knows will come next. "But you look sick," he says with finality.

Pidge holds in a sigh of defeat. She knows. Her face is pale, but her eyes and nose are red, puffy, and running. It sucks. She wishes space Claritin was a thing.

"I'm fine," she insists. "It's just allergies."

Shiro's forehead wrinkles in confusion. "Is there dust in the castle?" he asks.

Pidge nods, grateful for the out. "Yeah, dust," she agrees.

Shiro looks at her again. For a moment, she's afraid he's going to call her on her bluff, but instead, he says, "Great.” He gives her a smile that Pidge is 90% sure is a conniving one. He definitely spent too much time with her brother. “I'm sure Coran would help clean the castle,” he continues, and Pidge knows she’s backed herself into a corner. “We'll all help, since you need it."

And that's how Pidge wasted a day dusting the castle to Coran's weird cleaning songs, sneezing some more because holy hell, the castle really was dusty as shit.

* * *

She’s shortsighted for only testing one variable, Pidge decides. She needs to test water and light simultaneously. To do that, she needs sixteen plants. Acquiring sixteen identical plants is difficult enough, but the real problem is moving them into the castle without being seen.

Sneaking them into Green turns out to be easier than moving them all into the plant room without the others catching her in a hallway. She dodges Keith, hiding behind a corner with a little cart of four rock-like _kefeni_ plants, and exhales when he keeps going.

She has to reprogram the lights in her new botany lab, but that’s the easy part. The _kefeni_ don’t stand a chance when Team Voltron gets entrenched in a week-long effort to route out the Galra from a conquered—now free—planet. Pidge tries to revive them, but they just turn yellow, brittle, and dead. Experiment failed due to unpredictable, isolated external factors, she writes in her experiment log, and she picks up sixteen new spiky little dudes on the next planet.

At the end of two weeks, she has four of the plants still alive and a persistent, low-level headache from the pressure in her sinuses. It’s her biggest success so far. After the abject failure of the last two, she does a little dance in celebration. Her stuffy head makes her lose her balance and fall over when she punches the air. She lays there on the floor, breathing wheezily, and decides just to switch them all over to the most successful condition for this species—shady light with the low-water schedule and no dancing required.

Flush with success (and a low grade fever), she picks up another sixteen plants on the next planet.

But even as she's running her third experiment, the spiky plant-dudes start dying. They turn an amazing shade of bright red even as they shed their spikes, and Pidge just doesn't know why. She mulls over the data, babying it for a while, before she realizes the third variable she's been ignoring.

The soil.

Of course.

She runs a soil analysis on each of the plants and ruins one sample by sneezing on it. In the end, Pidge realizes she doesn’t know what to do with the data. She doesn’t even know what’s supposed to be in alien soil, which means she needs a control sample of dirt with her next batch of leafy subjects.

* * *

They stop at planet Bumber. The Galra there are an uninvolved, unliked ruling class, maintaining a grip on Bumber only for its use as a transportation hub and not for its natural resources. Getting the Empire off Bumber is vital and unfortunately not easy, given the number of soldiers that are docked there at any given time.

The party thrown after they've had time to tend to their wounds and rest is as luxurious as the locals can make it. Pidge’s ribs have taken a beating, but she’s still breathing easier after so much time away from her botany lab. She allows herself to be distracted from the pain by the hodgepodge of technology here and how they've made it all work together somehow. Hunk finds her, and together they interrogate some poor IT worker. To be honest, Pidge doesn’t even know their name.

Coran comes over and draws Hunk away, saying something about needing him to help select food supplies. Pidge’s head twitches slightly, and she watches them out of the corner of her eye. She hasn’t tried any vegetables… it could be worth a shot. She makes note of the alien they’re talking to (tall, spindly, bright yellow) and resolves to find them later.  
When Hunk and Coran move on, she slips away from her conversation and waits for a moment when Tall and Spindly is alone.

“I want some plants,” she says, and Tall and Spindly freezes in surprise. At least, she assumes it’s surprise.

After unfreezing, they say, “Green Paladin,” in a rich voice. “Much, I have already given. I cannot afford to give more, or I will starve the season away. Allow me to show you to a friend.”

Pidge nods. “Thanks,” she adds. Manners aren’t her forte, but she does know the basics.

The friend Tall and Spindly leads her to is clearly not a native of the planet. They’re round, squat, and utterly translucent. Pidge has to tear her eyes away from watching their organs work through their clear skin. She feels vaguely sick.

They’re negotiating plants (sixteen identical plants is apparently a lot—come on, haven’t these people ever run an experiment?) when Hunk comes back with a plate of food.

“Amr,” he says to Tall and Spindly. “This is amazing! What do I need to—” he breaks off, noticing Pidge standing there. “Oh. Hey. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Amr nods. “Yes. The Green Paladin requested—”

Pidge scrambles. “To meet people!” she interrupts. Internally, she face-palms.

Squat and See-through flaps their hand. “Yes,” they agree. “We are well met.”

Amr still looks confused, but Pidge is relieved that Squat and See-through has got her back here. Pidge manages to drift off with S&S while Amr and Hunk talk.

“I did not realize your species practiced deceit among friends,” S&S comments. Their eyes are squinted in a way Pidge assumes is suspicion.

“Uh-huh,” Pidge agrees, nodding. “It’s a common practice among humans to present gifts as surprises.” It’s the truth, but it’s also not what she’s doing. She hopes S&S can’t tell the difference.

They tilt their head, eyes roving over Pidge’s torso like that will give them answers. Pidge fidgets, weirded out. “Strange,” S&S comments. “Now, you wanted sixteen _gamboses_ —”

Pidge relaxes and continues their negotiations.

* * *

She hits the drawing board again with experiment four. She gets a test sample of dirt from Bumber, along with her standard sixteen plants. They’re shaped like vases, blue on the body and yellow on the rim. Unlike the others, these turn black as they die, which is as interesting as it is frustrating.

She conducts her experiment while dodging Hunk’s inquiries about their interaction on Bumber. Pidge lies her ass off some more, but Hunk is nosey and she ends up having to avoid him entirely while needing to sneeze all the time. The honking sounds and the multiple handkerchiefs aren’t subtle. The castle apparently doesn’t have any tissues, but sure, Earth was supposed to be the backwater planet.

She tracks percentages of nutrients in the soil samples every day. After two weeks, she only has a single living plant, and the blue on its leaves is starting to fade.

Pidge is sure it’s due to a lack of nitrogen. From school, she remembers that plant decay produces nitrogen in the nitrogen cycle. She tests all of her assorted dead plant matter (and she has a lot) and fist pumps when she finds she was right, adding the dead leaves to the soil.

Experiment five is a wash. The soft, fuzzy plants give her hives. She tries in vain to relieve the itching while (a) not scratching herself and (b) not letting anyone know she’s itchy. None of the creams she steals from the medbay work, and one even gives her an additional rash. By the time she hotwires an airlock so she can dump the fuzzy plants into the vacuum of space where they can’t bother her anymore, the vase of the single remaining _gambose_ has started turning black at the edges. She bangs her head on the table when she tests the soil and realizes that the _gambose_ now has too much nitrogen. Why are plants so… choosy?

When a code has a problem, Pidge can just read it (even if it takes hours and hours and her eyes get dry and she ends up yelling at the drawing of a rubber duck she made). She wishes she could read plant code. She thinks longingly of the headbands on Olkarion. Maybe she should have asked for one of those.

She tries, she really tries, but the _gambose_ sprouts new leaves even as it turns black, withered, and dead.

She touches it with her hand, head bowed.

_Fuck._

She soldiers on.

* * *

The problem with spending so much time with the plants is two-fold. One, she spends less time training. Two, she has to sneeze all the time and her eyes itch and water so much that she can't see. Sometimes, she stares longingly at her inhaler, struggling to breathe, and wonders if it's worth using one of the last remaining puffs.

Lance has started to make space allergy jokes. “You can take the girl out of Earth, but you can’t take the allergies out of space!” and “If your nose keeps running, we’ll have to get it a new pair of space shoes!” were favorites. The jokes grate on her, as do the watchful eyes of her team, but she can usually cope. But today, in the middle of an intense battle with enemy forces, is a very bad time to need to sneeze.

Every sniffle sends Green jerking through space. When her eyes water, she relies on Green to see, but their vision is hazy. She barely dodges enemy fire. Her heart jackhammers in her chest at the near miss. As she prepares to send a plant bomb their way, though, a sneeze rips through her. She and Green flinch together, throwing Pidge back against the seat and throwing their plant bomb off course. Lance narrowly avoids being hit and yells through the comms. Pidge wipes her nose on the back of her gauntlet and refocuses.

* * *

Safely back in her hanger, Pidge takes off her helmet and throws it against the cockpit. _Goddamn it!_ She coughs, hacks, and splutters. The wateriness in her eyes turns into angry tears running down her face. What is she even doing?

She hiccups and struggles to breathe. Can’t breathe right, can’t fly right, can’t even grow a fucking plant right. She’s supposed to be a paladin of the forest, but all she has is a botany lab of dead plants and they’re killing her in turn. She reaches for the inhaler, resolutely taking a puff. She holds her breath, as much as it hurts, to allow the medicine to take effect before exhaling.

She feels a gentle, inquisitive nudge at her mind. It feels almost like a hug, and Pidge has to squeeze her eyes shut against a different sort of tears.

The Green Lion curls around her paladin’s mind, soothing her with the sensation of purrs. The engine beneath her rumbles. Soft as it is, the feeling still shakes Pidge’s teeth. She has never heard Green’s voice, but she feels the Lion’s question nonetheless.

_What’s wrong? What’s wrong? My Paladin, Precious, Little One, what’s wrong?_

Pidge thinks despairingly of her collection of dead plants, and she compares that with that one day on Olkarion where she felt connected to everything. Knowing that, feeling that, every dead plant has been a blow to her chest, knocking the wind out of her.

She lays that next to her fear that Green will be disappointed. The Green Lion is—when she feels her, Green is so bright, so vibrant, always alive and growing, whereas Pidge has only been a death sentence lately. What if… what if the Green Lion thinks she’s made a mistake? What if Green rejects her? It would feel like a rending of her soul, and Pidge couldn’t bear it.

Pidge feels amusement from the Green Lion, and then, slowly, Green begins showing her images. There are plants in the forest, rife with insects and animals and rain and sunshine, not sad little things in pots, isolated and alone. There is a sprout, growing and growing, under foot and under brush, until it reaches the canopy, and there is also the vine that strangles the life out of it.

And there is excitement and curiosity and awe, and then there is Pidge herself, her gizmos and gadgets, and the same wonderous feeling. There are Pidge and Green together, vibrant, verdant, and growing, and there’s the team beyond them, the rest of their forest, all around them, supplying them with heat, and water, and earth, and sky.

As the Green Lion withdraws the images from her paladin’s mind, Pidge finds herself smiling. Right. Of course. Pidge isn’t the Green Paladin because she’s a master gardener—she’s the Green Paladin because she and Green both know what it is to wonder and want and desperately seek out the answers of the universe with their own hands. They are paladin and Lion, bonded together by… by their souls, their quintessence, their neural patterns and energy- whatever, Pidge doesn’t do philosophy- and nothing and no one can get between them.

Not even Pidge’s inability to grow a plant.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment, I thrive on them


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